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perspiring face lit up. “No shit. Well, hallelujah. Let’s see what I can find.” Not often did a forensics team find an untouched scene; usually it was already contaminated by the responding officers, or family members, or even well-meaning neighbors.
    Giving Boyd time to collect his evidence wouldn’t make Taylor Allen any less dead. Knox withdrew to the other side of the road and let Boyd work.
    Collecting evidence was a painstaking process. Smooth surfaces were dusted for prints, photos were taken, tweezers were used to pluck tiny pieces of paper or cloth or other material out of the grass. Boyd made several circuits of the house, looking for footprints, tire prints in the driveway, anything he could photograph, lift, or otherwise preserve. The summer day grew hotter. Eastern Kentucky was usually cooler than the rest of the state, because of the mountainous terrain, but today the temperature had to be at least ninety.
    Finally Boyd signaled he was finished with the outside, as he carried some of his gear to his van. Knox and one of his investigators, Roger Dee Franklin, tried to finesse all the door locks but were unable to get them open. The sliding glass doors had been secured with a safety bar. Finally, in frustration, Knox called for the heavy battering ram they used to knock down doors. He selected the back door for their entrance, as it was the farthest from the crime scene, and let the boys do their job. When the back door was reduced to separate pieces hanging lopsidedly on the hinges, he and Roger Dee, along with Boyd, stepped into the house.
    The first thing Knox noticed was that the door had been locked with a sturdy dead bolt.
    Ditto the front door. The dead bolt there was even bigger. The sliding doors were out because there was no way to fix the security bar in place from outside.
    But the house was empty. An efficient search revealed that the only person inside, other than themselves, was the victim.
    “How in hell?” Roger Dee muttered to himself. “All the doors are locked, and no one else is here. Don’t tell me Mr. Allen speared himself.”
    “The garage,” Knox said. “The garage door opener is probably missing from the car. Make sure Boyd dusts the car for prints.” That was the only logical way for the killer to exit; he could then lower the garage door and the house was locked up tight. It was an excellent delaying tactic.
    Roger Dee left, and returned to say, “No opener that I can see, but the car is one of the new ones with the garage door opener built in. He probably didn’t have a separate remote.”
    “Bet he did. We’ll find out from his wife. Most people don’t go to the bother of programming the built-in openers when they’ve got the remote right there anyway. By the way, has Mrs. Allen been contacted?”
    “A couple of friends are driving her home.”
    “She probably hasn’t realized yet that she can’t stay here. Make certain she’s intercepted, and taken to a motel.” Whenever someone was murdered, in the absence of glaring evidence to the contrary, Knox automatically suspected the spouse. He couldn’t quite see the trophy wife doing the deed with a spear, but stranger things had happened. Until he checked out her alibi, she was a suspect.
    He wandered through the house, seeing what he could see. A single coffee cup sat in the sink, along with a cereal bowl and a lone spoon. Breakfast for one, indicating that Taylor Allen had either been alone or merely eaten alone. Knox looked in the trash and saw the package for a microwave dinner, along with the black plastic container that still contained a few bites of what looked like broccoli. A wrapper from a candy bar lay on top of that.
    Upstairs, only one side of the bed had been slept in. The bed was made up, after a fashion: the custom-made bedspread had been pulled up over the pillows, but the bed was nice and smooth on one side, and sort of lumpy where the sheet hadn’t been straightened out on the other. Knox